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Conviction: Murder at the Station; Unspun with Matt Forde

BBC Two has joined in the wave of crime documentaries with an enthralling re-examination of a 2008 murder conviction

Andrew Billen

September 22 2016, 12:01am, The Times

Louise Shorter investigates alleged miscarriages of justice

Conviction: Murder at the Station BBC Two★★★★☆

Unspun with Matt Forde Dave★★★☆☆

As far as TV executives are concerned, true life crime is the new crime drama. The age of amateur video and CCTV has made crimes that were previously lost to the past accessible again to television, while decades of miscarriages of justice have led to a feeling that few convictions are watertight.

Equally, the bad guys sometimes get away with it — as argued by Channel 4’s Interview with a Murderer in June on the Carl Bridgewater case, and HBO’s The Jinx about the millionaire Robert Durst, who is now facing a murder trial in California.

In the summer Kevin Lygo, ITV’s new director of progammes, asked out loud: “What is the modern…